Yes, pretty much. It's like slashdot's next generation interface: Completely bat-fuck broken (seriously, it doesn't work; I can't follow the "replies to your comments" links, they takes me to unrelated comments under the same article), but in 3 months they'll release a new, working version. Sony will release a 6 core handheld, and in 3 months phones will release a 3 core handheld but the cores will be ARMv12, twice the clock, and have dedicated coprocessors for graphics and physics that outperform Sony's

Except slashdot hasbeen at it for 3 years and every new version is slower and runs worse than the previous version. I dontknow about any one else but it is almost unusable on my phone now. Comments take 10-30 seconds to load, articles disappear. The side bar randomly vanishes and the icons no longer scale.

Sony is at least doing something useful with that power. Slashdot seems to need a quadcore phone LTE to load easily.

Likely a lot less. These Android hardware specs were announced several months ago for up coming models. They are clearly running in parallel time tables. By the time the NGP is available, competing hardware with equal or superior specs will already be out for Android.

Only Apple is likely to be caught behind by this, but likely only one generational cycle at worst. So in the grand scheme, this is a complete non-news story.

Likely a lot less. These Android hardware specs were announced several months ago for up coming models. They are clearly running in parallel time tables. By the time the NGP is available, competing hardware with equal or superior specs will already be out for Android.

Only Apple is likely to be caught behind by this, but likely only one generational cycle at worst. So in the grand scheme, this is a complete non-news story.

Thanks to the explosion of Smartphones, Nintendo and Sony no longer have the edge in pe

I think the closest match to this device now would be the iPod Touch in terms of pricing the NGP. You pay more for a phone just just because it is a phone. A 32 GB iPhone 4 is £612, the iPod Touch is £254. The other components in the iPhone (IPS screen, 3G radio and camera) do not add up enough to charge the extra £358, they charge more for a phone because it what the market will pay for the product. I don't think the market would pay £600 for the NGP.

Yep. The major problem of consoles is that they stay static for ten years while everybody else follows Moore's law. By next Xmas smartphones will have caught up and the year after that this will just be 'meh' in terms of computing power.

PS: Yes... staying static has the advantage that developers have exact specs to develop/optimize for.

Unlikely. Sony essentially took current smartphone tech and scaled it up. Smartphones are starting to ship with dual-core Cortex A9 processors, Sony threw in a quad-core. Smartphones are starting to ship with single-core PowerVR SGX540s, Sony through in four of 'em.

The reason you won't see this in 6 months from smartphone vendors is because Sony has a bigger power budget; the PSP doesn't have to be as small and light as a smartphone, so they can afford to burn a lot less power. The NGP probably draws three

This time next year, we may be saying 'quad-core Cortex A9 smartphones *just* hit the market', and the NGP will have been out for a couple of weeks which just hit the market. 12 months to catchup, doubt it, 24 months yes.

for clarification on your post, the PowerVR SGX540 is a 4 core version, not 4 chips. PowerVR has an 8 core chip as well that can push 5x the triangles and has 4x the fill rate, but that probably consumed too much power (they may not have the power reqs of phones, but they still have reqs).

My guess is they went with PowerVR because they had the fastest GPU that wasn't only a system-on-a-chip. Snapdragon Adreno's performance numbers are pretty bad comparably (they are geared more to battery life), and nVidia

Heh... Someone could probably already make a smartphone in that same class. Unless Sony's getting a complete exclusive on the cores on their SoC (VERY Unlikely...) someone else can spin one. If Sony's doing what I think they are, then someone else can just buy the SoC and put it in a smartphone.

A generation beyond? I respect John Carmack a lot because of his contributions to a LOT of things in the game and other industries. In this one, I'm a bit afraid he's overstated the NGP's play here.

I would disagree in this case. I think by launching a phone line that actually competes against the NGP is just another way that they're going to cannibalize their sales and fracture their install basis. If the Playstation Suite catches on outside of Sony Phones, they might have a chance at success, but that's asking a lot. It may be a cool product, but Sony is going to be another android phone in an already fractured market, where the key to their success is having a solid install basis. Don't get me wrong

Ya, releasing the phone so close to NGP launch is a little weird (not to mention that the PSP is about to be retired), but you can also see it as a "test" run to iron out problems.

And when I said "If nothing goes wrong", I meant nothing goes terribly wrong. That they don't drop the ball and botch it, something that happens with Sony quite a bit, not "hope for perfect circumstances".

IMO it's either integrate you game platform into a phone, or wait for Apple to eat your market share. Few people like carrying

It's Sony. Nintendo doesn't have to worry - it just has to stay out of the way while Sony self-destructs due to internal conflicts, dead-end media formats mandated by other Sony divisions, unrealistic price-points, market-alienating legal maneuvers, and the like.

Nintendo needs to worry about Microsoft: now that Xbox and Kinect are the golden children in Redmond - and seeing how much better Microsoft is in dealing with the global market than either of the Japanese companies are - the next gen could belong to

It's Sony. Nintendo doesn't have to worry - it just has to stay out of the way while Sony self-destructs due to internal conflicts, dead-end media formats mandated by other Sony divisions, unrealistic price-points, market-alienating legal maneuvers, and the like.

Nintendo needs to worry about Microsoft: now that Xbox and Kinect are the golden children in Redmond - and seeing how much better Microsoft is in dealing with the global market than either of the Japanese companies are - the next gen could belong to MS. Nintendo has to "open the kimono" a little bit if it wants to continue on the successes of the Wii and the DS.

Yes, yes. I'm sure they will repeat ALL their mistakes they made in the past./rolleyes

When it comes to open-formats they notice no one but a few geeks give a damn - not to mention the same few geeks will probably use the open-standard as a way to hack the system too.

Anyway the point of discussion here is, IMO if you want your handheld platform to survive it's goes to be necessary to integrate it into a phone. Few people like carrying an extra gadget around, they will use whatever device is available to gam

ya, and specifically, it's only *1* generation ahead of cell phones, and even then, it's not on store shelves yet. By the time it hits (close to xmas) we'll be seeing talk of 4 core ARM9 droid phones just as we were all wondering if the nexus S was going to be the first dual core Droid phone.

Which I think was the point of the rest of the announcement. The PSP2 *should* be a phone, but isn't, but they're at least going to make all that PSP/PSP2/PSone goodness available on other ARM9 devices soon enough via

Which was a shame, since it allowed Nintendo to gouge the market for years. Yeah, the game gear ate batteries like a pig, but it had a nice backlighted color screen which would only appear on the Gameboy ten years later.

Yeah, well despite all of their past media format defeats, they just won on BluRay so now they are more convinced than ever. They're like the person that's been pumping $100 worth of quarters into the slot machine all day and just got a $10 payoff...they're on a roll now. So they double down by playing 2 slot machines at once, so they can double their "winnings".

DAT is used heavily even today in the pro world. it's a failure in the consumer world for one reason only the Copyright bit disallowed recording DAT to DAT making home recorders useless.

Minidisc was not a failure, it sold more units than mp3 players did for the first few years mp3 players were available. it just had bad timing and shoddy quality of the portable players coupled with overly complex tiny tinfoil parts that were easily destroyed.

Sony tries to run their Commercial division the way they run their Professional division. In the Pro division they are constantly introducing new formats - first Umatic VCRs, then Betacam, then Betacam SP, then Video8, then Hi8, the Betacam Digital, then Betacam HD, and so on.

The pros happily gobble-up all these new formats because they can afford the huge upgrade costs, but that doesn't work for the Consumer division. You'd think Sony would finally learn but they never do. They just keep introducing on

Video8 was never a pro format! It was better than VHS-C, but barely. Both Video8 and Hi8 were much more consumer focussed, although there were some pro Hi8 cameras.

MiniDisc is also far from a flop - it is used extensively in the radio industry and in ENG applications and is still one of the best replacements for cassette tape as a re-recordable medium. It failed in the consumer space because the consumer-level decks had the stupid Serial Copy Management System that prevented you making digital copies more than one generation deep (even of your own stuff), which the pro-hardware didn't have. It also faced the rise of the mp3 player. It was also pretty successful in the UK market before mp3 came along, with several manufacturers selling portable and deck players and combined HiFi systems with MD built in. The pre-recorded market never took off - there was no benefit over CD at the time, but as a re-recordable format it was a huge hit.

Betacam is essentially the same tape, from SP through to HD-Cam SR. Betacam is backwards compatible - You can play small or large Beta-SP tapes in a digibeta deck, or digibeta tapes in a HD-Cam SR deck. They are brilliant formats, and still used today. Mind you, a digibeta recordable deck will still set you back £40,000, or HD-Cam SR for around £90,000.

As a distribution medium for a closed games console it makes perfect sense. Compatibility is only interesting when there are other devices that use the data. As no other machine will be designed to run the PSP2 games, nothing is lost.The DS cards are "proprietary", as are any game carts that came before it, and even the DVDs for the PS3, 360 and Wii are proprietary due to the use of encryption and signing technologies.

Since Sony have slowly been warming to SD cards, they might even include a dual SD / memor

Geohot didn't get sued for hacking the system. He got sued for publishing the hack.

I'm a big believer in rooting my phones, but I understand how game systems work... the hardware is a loss leader for the company, and unless you want future game systems to cost as much as high powered PCs, you should be against rooting them too.

In portable gaming device land, one generation is somewhere around 5 years, which would be OK for sony, since for the entire lifespan of the thing, it will lead smartphones in terms of specs. In mobile phone land, a generation is around 1 year (you know, to get the general cattle frothing at the mouth for the new shiny for a few months before their contract is up for renewal), see apple if you need evidence, 1 apple, 1 year, 1 iphone...

Now guess what happens when sony release the NGP next holiday season, only to be overtaken by phones within a year.

Also, everyone claiming this thing is as powerfull as a PS3, can i have some of what you are smoking?

This is why I keep postponing purchase of a new phone. I know that the $200 iPhone-clone with internet capability will probably drop to $30 1.5 years from now. I'm a patient person.

>>>see apple if you need evidence

And Macs. Got a G4 that won't run the latest Safari or iTunes (good thing Opera supports old computers else I'd be browserless). I eventually sold the G4 ought of frustration. Meanwhile my XP-PC still runs everything I th

This is why I keep postponing purchase of a new phone. I know that the $200 iPhone-clone with internet capability will probably drop to $30 1.5 years from now. I'm a patient person.

I haven't looked that much but I'm nearly positive you can get a low end android phone now for that $30 that will do at least say 50% of what an iPhone or the higher end phones will do and you can even go without a contract. That 50% may be 90% or more of what you want to do or it may not but it will likely surprise you how much more you can do with a computer you carry with you all the time that has a mobile data plan.

And Macs. Got a G4 that won't run the latest Safari or iTunes (good thing Opera supports old computers else I'd be browserless). I eventually sold the G4 ought of frustration. Meanwhile my XP-PC still runs everything I throw at it, even though it's a year older. "Long term support" is one advantage MS has over Apple. even though MS software is inferior.

Yeah you got nailed by a major platform change. It was for the better in the long run, bu

Also, everyone claiming this thing is as powerfull as a PS3, can i have some of what you are smoking?

they won't because their joint is really really small. And they don't like to share it among too many people.

more seriously : the NGP's powerVR will have to power a screen which has less than a quater of what the PS3 drives (900x480 vs 1920x1080p). In addition to that, as said pixel are small, it's very likely that some eye candy will be turned down as it's unnecessary/unnoticeable). Last but not least, the technological jewell inside the PS3 is the Cell processor. The GPU is somewhat related to NVidida GeF

thing is, the GPU is the only chip getting the benefit from the scaled down res/textures, stuff like physcis/AI still needs the same horsepower, and even though CELL is a bitch to program for, it undeniably has far more horse power then 4 arm cores at ~1 GHz

touch-screen only toys, with terrible ergonomics that only support shallow, gimmicky games.

and for 99% of people out there,that's more than enough,as they only want a couple of casual games to kill some time while waiting for the bus / train. Or check their FarmVille while on the go. These people are already happy with anything like a Simon-interface, as long as it has shiny eye candy graphics and connects to facebook.

iphone and android smartphone are already doing well in this area and have the advantage to also work as a telephone,a PDA and a gps, while being subsidised.

Wow. TWO proprietary card slots? The game media I can understand, and even though it's proprietary I'd understand the secondary slot being Sony Memory Stick (I'd hate it, but it's sony, so I'd understand). But we're not even talking proprietary as in Sony Memory Stick, but as in an entirely new media format. Way to go, Sony.

Oh, and they don't see how 3D translates to portable gaming? Well, I'm not surprised. They didn't see how motion control translated to console video gaming either, and laughed about how useless it was for 3 years before their "hey, hey, look at me....we can do it too, and in the lamest way possible" release of Move. I wouldn't be surprised if 2 years down the line they are suddenly all over 3D portable gaming and end up implementing it on the NGP by shipping new games with a pair of red/blue glasses.

You must be new here. People complain that Sony is proprietary (even though any old USB device works with my PS3 and I can even plug in standard logitech keyboards to type or Epson printers to print my photos), but don't complain about the 360's locked down ports or Nintendo's lack of anything standard.

They whine because they're anti-Sony, not because they have a good reason. We call it hating.

If you read my post, you will see that I said I could understand the game itself being proprietary. But the removable media is going to be for things like photos, application data, etc. I absolutely expect that to be on standard removable media formats. Wii uses a standard SD card. Xbox 360 has now dumped memory cards and uses standard USB thumb drives. That's great because those are standard media formats. I don't have to buy extra memory specifically for those devices. When I decided I needed to copy a sa

A smart phone without a contract is $500. This'll retail for $250 and drop in price.

And an Ipod Touch with 8GB included is just $230, and is just as capable of falling in price (since it is also not a phone).

The Ipod will also get a hardware upgrade yearly that I'm not expecting to see for this NGP (unless they break the "fixed platform spec" mantra successful consoles have followed for the last 30 years).

"Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs."

Carmack isn't saying that the hardware in the NGP is a generation ahead of smart phones. He's saying that because of the APIs available to developers they'll be able to utilise that hardware more effectively (specifically that a developer will be able to squeeze an extra generation's worth of performance out of hardware with approx. the same specifications), which makes sense once you consider that the games are pretty much running on the bare metal, and that the entire system is optimised for gaming.

and I guess that's why Google released r5 [blogspot.com] of their NDK - which basically offers native development for Android (focussed on games, but "you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java.")

I think the days are numbered for dedicated game machines when you can get Phones and tablets that will do games "good enough" for most and do much more besides.

If I stack a 7" Android tablet against the NGP. I see an open computer with plenty of free, low cost software vs a proprietary game machine with expensive proprietary apps, expensive proprietary media. I just don't think this model is really going to remain relevant anymore.

However, it is often content that sells platforms. Rightly or wrongly, game developers think of the Android market as one where people do not want to pay money for premium content: a buck or two for an addictive casual game is alright, but is anyone going to download a copy of Kingdom Hearts: Droid for $20?

Given that there still is a market for $20, $30, even $40 handheld games (though a risky one with shrinking margins), what is the best kind of platform for selling titles in that market? I'm honestly not

I think the days are numbered for dedicated game machines when you can get Phones and tablets that will do games "good enough" for most and do much more besides.

I think Sony recognizes that the general-purpose mobile device market is becoming key to mobile gaming, which is they announced the Playstation Suite framework (initially for Android 2.3+, apparently with cross-platform mobile plans) at the same time that they announced the NGP.

How is John Carmack relevant to games anymore, especially smartphone games or handhelds? Before you mod me flamebait, see if you can answer that question. See if you can find something he has worked on in the past 20 years that isn't a re-make of Doom or Quake, and that is somehow related to handheld devices. I'm not flaming, I just want someone to explain why what Carmack says has any importance anymore. Surely there are better people suited to making determinations about handheld devices...

It's probably one of the best-looking mobile games ever seen, right up there with Epic's Infinity Blade (some say even better).

You may not like Carmack saying that Sony's NGP is doing something better than Android/iOS, but he's still extremely relevant to the game development world. id tech 5 is currently looking like it'll surpass Unreal Engine 3 easily and even CryEngine 3, making it the most powerful multiplatform graphics/game engine on the market. Similarly, id's mobile engine is setting up to

You're equating games to engine technology, and that's fundamentally the distinction that many people miss. Carmack doesn't make games, he makes game engine technology. Whether or not id can use that engine technology to its fullest to make their games is a completely different question.
In terms of engine technology, Carmack is still good at finding low level insights and even high level algorithms. So that's why he's still relevant, even if people don't necessarily want to buy into his megatexture tech (

I have no idea how many people buy an iPhone just so they can play games, but it's likely not very many; I suspect more buy the phone because it can make calls (and play games and do other nifty stuff and everyone thinks it's cool).

Android I'm not so sure about. I literally do not know a single person who uses an Android-based phone (although I want to

And the technical aspcets of the PSP were also beyond any other similar device of its generation and yet it fall behind in sales to the NDS in every market. Is not about the power of the hardware, is about the entertainment that brings the games.

If it was about the entertainment, then NDS wouldn't be doing so well either. Most of the titles are shovelware games, primarily based on TV shows and other properties. But the DS is very popular among kids. The problem with the PSP was that it tried to provide the exact same experience as a home console on a handheld, so what you ended up with were watered down home console games. At least with the DS, you have that touch screen that provides for some game features unique to that product.

DS has the biggest library of JRPG's on any platform to date... Atlas has been providing some very entertaining, quality products for the entire of the DS's lifespan. If you think the DS is for kids you are talking on hear say, not actual fact.

Sony sure has screwed-up. They had the #1 console for ten years. They sold nearly 300 million units and smashed the competition (nintendo64, sega saturn, gamecube, xbox). And then threw it all away with bad ideas and an overpriced PS3. Not that PS3 is a bad console but a release price of $700 is ridiculously high.

Now it appears they are repeating the PS3 mistake with the PSP-2. They ought to learn a lesson from Nintendo

Don't forget that they sold over 60 million PSP units, which isn't exactly shabby either. That's more than N64 and GameCube combined. It's just that this number looks kind of bleak compared to the staggering 144 million DS units Nintendo sold.

Orginal Gameboy almost sold 119 million, Gameboy Color sold 118 million, Gameboy Advanced sold 81.51 million. This is not including the other variations to the Gameboy series, like the Micro, Light, Advanced SP etc. Not forgetting Nintendo had competitors like the Sega Gamegear.

the GB didn't have to compete against real competitors. The Lynx, the Game Gear, et al. had a lousy lack luster game line up compared to the PSP's in relative terms. There were nearly no must-haves in the GG's lineup, or Lynx's. PSP? I could name a few. Not to mention the business model that Sony has is way superior to Atari or Sega's. Given that Sony's still making hardware.

Heh... It's not even really next generation except for gaming handhelds right at the moment. All it would take to have a smartphone "catch up" is grab the SoC for the NGP or a similar one and put it in a phone.

Also, every portable console EVER has had proprietary storage - why should this one be different?

For the game media? Sure, I'll accept proprietary, But the secondary slot is for non-game data....like, say, photos taken with the camera, and other data from applications. If you are going to have those stored to built in, non-removable memory, we don't like that but we'd understand. But if you are going to be good enough to put it on removable media, then use something that's already standard. For crying out loud, we've got SD, mini SD, and micro SD. All have become standard and are used in tons of device

This one should be different because, as is obvious to everyone, this is more and more going to have to compete with mobile phones. A huge selection of which allow generic SD memory use. It's just one extra inconvenience of buying this for gaming over a good phone (which, as a bonus, operates as a phone).

Wow, so merely liking a platform that is unpopular with slashdot makes you a fanboy now? Is it possible for him to genuinely find iOS compelling for what he is doing in his line of work without him being what you are equating with some brainwashed, blind worshipper. Of all people to accuse of being "hypnotised by marketing" John Carmack is pretty low down on the list of likely candidates.

So to be an apple fanboy you need to:

* work on the platform and express that you quite like it, producing some pretty good stuff.* ask a question that you don;t know the answer to, re: android and iOS app sales in a consumer demographic that he is interested in (people going to a con named after a game he created)* express surprise at the answer received, one that points to him possibly reevaluating how much energy to put into porting his new engine over, given that a loose poll at QuakeCon suggests that sales on Android are as high as they are on iOS among his target demographic.

* Profit?

I'm not seeing how you can twist this into "he's an Apple Fanboy" unless you really just mean "anyone who says anything positive about iOS is a fanboy" which is probably it.

That's not a quote though, at least not one that has been attributed to him by the poster. You don't quote someone by saying "he was all like" and then throwing in a cheap bit of hyperbole unless that is exactly what he said. I can't find an actual quote via google right now, but I am willing to be corrected. This is how Apple "facts" get started on/. - someone posits something like that carmack 'quote' and it is accepted as fact from then onwards. The phrase is obviously BS, and it may or may not be an ac

I've recently looked at Android API documentation, and it seems to be a rather clean and understandable design. I've dabbled a bit with the SDK and running my code on one of those cheap Augen Android-based tablets from Kmart, and going past "hello world" was quite painless. Then, for reasons I can't quite understand, I seem to puke a little bit every time I see Objective C code. It just looks so darn ugly. For whatever reason I just can't stand some of Apple's APIs. Never mind that they plainly don't docume

And yet Carmack still said that NGP is BETTER than his beloved apple product, despite it being made by the people who brought you the hated PS3 in all its terribleness. For a fanboy, he sure is even handed.

I think ARM is a great choice for mobile gaming, they do computing performance/watt quite well and apparently such things exist as 4 core ARM chips with the memory controller attached to each core, meaning you can write a standard multi-threaded app and it just works, unlike that SPU DMA->register fil

I am quite sure he prefers the iphone platform for the same exact reasons I do. The bottom line is performance. If you are a game coder being able to optimize every single clock cycle is not a nice to have feature but a must. Yes I know you can do native code development on the android but it is still a bastardization at best. It is the number one reason that iOS dominates mobile phone / platform gaming.

No, you misunderstood. The title, summary and even the article didn't help either because they only quoted part of Carmack's sentence. Seriously, it's a twitter message why did they fail to quote it in it's entirety?Here's the full quote: "Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs."So he isn't talking about the hardware but the software. The way you access the handheld's (and video game consoles in general) hardware is lower level than tha